From Calgary to Madrid

The joke goes: A tourist travelling in Spain sits down at a local bodega and sees a local man being served a large plate of stewed meat. He asks for the same but the waiter apologizes. “Only one per day, señor. These are the testicles of the bull who has been killed today by the matador. You must reserve ahead.” So the tourist makes a reservation and returns the next day, anticipating a delicacy. The waiter approaches with a covered plate, only to reveal a rather meagre little sausage. “What’s the deal?” the angry customer says. “I saw what you served yesterday.”

“But señor,” the waiter protests, “the bull does not always lose.”

These days the bulls—or their two-legged defenders—are indeed fighting back. Bullfighting in Spain has become a hot-button political issue. Could there be parallels with Calgary’s favourite animal-based event, which is going ahead “come hell or high water”?

Jokes aside, a bullfight most often ends with a dead bull. I suspect this aspect of bullfighting may come as a surprise to some tourists—the fact that you are paying to see a series of mighty, majestic animals being ritually put to death. Some visitors surely think it’s like “Bully for Bugs,” where Matador Bugs Bunny just makes the big brute look foolish for a while. Whatever other purpose it may serve, seeing a bull stabbed to death before a cheering crowd and then dragged around the ring, leaving a trail of gore in the sand, certainly puts the Calgary Stampede in perspective. It’s essentially the difference between hockey and gladiatorial combat.

Animal entertainments are a regional affair. Latin and South America have cockfights, as does Southeast Asia—in the Philippines you can watch roosters battle to the death on TV. Dog-loving Calgarians should be glad they don’t live in a dog-fighting country like Pakistan, where the blood sport is rooted in rural areas. Instead, Calgary has a ropin’, ridin’ and racing tradition. And Spain has its bullfighting. While the culture of bestial contests is changing in many places, such traditions can also be deeply ingrained in national identity. Nowhere is this more so than in Spain, where the bull is a national symbol. You’d think being on all those souvenir flags would work to Toro’s advantage, but no.

The Stampede and the Spanish bullfighting ring have both seen their share of protests. For decades, the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth has been the target of animal-rights activists who say the rodeo is cruel and

endangers animals. Last year, three horses died in a chuckwagon race on July 12th and Stampede organizers once again came under fire from protesters who view the “chucks” as barbaric and inhumane. (Since 1986, more than 50 chuckwagon horses have died during Stampede events, as have two cowboys.)

A recent Spanish anti-bullfighting campaign with the slogan “La Tortura no es cultura” (“Torture is not culture”) may remind some of protesters’ signs outside the Stampede grounds reading, “Tradition is no excuse for abuse.” But, unlike the Stampede, bullfighting has become part of a battle fought in a far larger arena. Political and cultural battles are swirling around the matadors and their prey.

Like government funding for hockey rinks and football stadiums in North America, bullfighting has become a fight over public subsidies. There are Spanish government subsidies for ranchers who raise fighting bulls, and the Spanish parliament has recently been debating a law that would make bullfighting a protected cultural heritage, clearing the way for more public funding. In April, an Ipsos Mori poll found 76 percent of Spaniards oppose public funding, and only 29 percent support bullfighting at all. (By contrast a 2006 Ipsos Reid poll showed 86 percent of Albertans support the rodeo.) It’s become a European Union issue, too, as British activists complain that the blood sport is being subsidized with EU money—their money. And finally, there is the ongoing “Two Solitudes” fight between Spain and the autonomous region of Catalonia. The region that includes Barcelona has always been home to separatist stirrings, and its 2010 ban on bullfights has been seen as a declaration of cultural autonomy from Spain. Attempts to rescind the Catalan bullfighting ban have become a proxy fight over the region’s future political status, inside or outside of Spain. Similarly, the city of Donostia/San Sebastian in the Basque region put a stop to bullfights this year, in part through the efforts of pro-independence groups who reject bullfighting as an aspect of Spanish culture.

While the Stampede is definitely tied in with Alberta’s cultural identity, Western separatism would have to gain a lot more traction before the annual rodeo would ever become the same sort of political flashpoint.

On a recent tour through Spain, I bumped into Marta Merino at Madrid’s La Bicicleta Cafe where she was having brunch with friends. Remarkably, the Merino was on a visit back home from her current job at the Solara Resort in Canmore. Although unfamiliar with the nature of Calgary Stampede protests, she’s very aware of anti-bullfighting sentiment, and endorses it. “Younger people don’t believe in it,” said Merino, 29. “Older people, wealthy people support bullfighting. Also in the south of Spain it is more popular—young people grow up with this tradition. They are more likely to support it.”

If it is indeed true that wealthy Spaniards are more likely to endorse bullfighting, there appear to be fewer wealthy Spaniards these days. Attendance has plunged, seemingly in lockstep with the troubled Spanish economy. Just as the Stampede is sometimes seen as a bellwether, with the annual tarp auction considered a measure of Alberta’s economic health, a decline in bullfights has been held up as evidence of Spain’s economic woes. According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, the number of bullfights in Spain has dropped by about half since 2007.

Disputes over the Stampede sometimes seem like another front in the culture wars. Behind the animal-cruelty issue often lurks an urban vs. rural, hip-hop vs. country split—a divide between those who see themselves as more cosmopolitan and those who claim to value a more rugged tradition. That dividing line seems to run through Spain as well. “If you are interested in traditional Spanish culture you like bullfighting,” Merino says. “But we who are interested in a wider range of art and culture, we do not care about bullfighting.”

Arguments about both the rodeo and the bullring gain extra passion from the perception that rejecting the events is akin to rejecting deeply ingrained cultural traditions. But comparisons between Stampede and bullfighting can only go so far before they run into a fundamental difference, one that raises the stakes in the Spanish debate. While PETA and other organizations argue that accidents like the one that killed the chuckwagon horses last July are inevitable, they are nonetheless accidents. After a successful Stampede event all the animals are more or less safe (some professional cowboys even describe their animals as family members). After a successful bullfight all the bulls are dead.

During a previous visit to Spain, I attended a bullfight at the Maestranza Bullring, one of the country’s oldest, in the southern city of Seville. There are the matadors, strutting about in outfits that make Don Cherry look like a bank president, the lance-carrying picadors in braided gold coats and bandoliers with bright-coloured spears, the latter two tasked with wounding the raging bull so that the matador can come in close for the final act. The picadors ride horses covered with armour—and blindfolded so they don’t realize what they’ve got themselves into.

The stylized dance of death between doomed bull and strutting matador will continue only until the matador has won his share of applause. He will then produce a sword and flourish it in front of the dazed beast, like a judge pronouncing sentence. On the next pass the sword will be thrust into the shoulder of the bull. If done properly the bull will drop to its knees and the coup de grace will be delivered to the neck with a short blade. The lifeless bull is then hitched to a team of horses and dragged around the ring as the band plays and the crowd roars. He’s then off to be the special of the day somewhere (the meat of vanquished bulls is indeed used, either sold or donated. As for the testicles, I couldn’t say). Given the chance, I imagine he’d prefer to have hosted an annoying cowboy for eight seconds or less.

It doesn’t always happen so neatly. One bull almost succeeded in goring the picador; another attempted to leap the wall, until distracted from this clever stratagem by a banderillero. Worst is when the matador cannot manage the deathblow. In Seville I watched as one bull was stabbed six, seven times, and still lived—a fumbled execution that was excruciating to watch.

Brutal, but the drama of the spectacle was undeniable. Will a tradition immortalized by the likes of Picasso, Goya and Hemingway truly disappear from Spanish arenas?

“Yes,” says her friend Anna Fernandez. “I think in five or 10 years, things will change.”

With death on the bill at every performance, the stakes are higher in the bullring than at a rodeo. Yet my guess is that matadors and their work are no more likely to disappear than the chuckwagon races at the Calgary Stampede.

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